After a certain amount of prompting this weekend, I continue my epic about internet dating. I suspect that this is a bad thing to do, but it all amuses me, so - Katie Melua in the background and beer in hand - I'm off...
The whole internet dating thing's all a bit nerve-wracking: you have 300 words in which to prostitute yourself, and then you have to hope that others manage to read between the lines, are able to pick up the nuances in your description, can read you as you're meant to be read. Luckily, I have enough practice reading kids' work to identify the real person behind the writing. I'm not sure this is a good thing though.
To cynical ol' me, profiles fall into three categories. The first group are those whose profiles might as well read
I'm not bothered about looks, it's personality that counts (although all I want is a woman who's blonde, tall, thin, with huge breasts so don't bother applying unless you hit three out of these criteria)
. You can be sure that a lot of the people who specify their ideal woman's size/shape are not quite 10/10 on the physical perfection scale themselves, and co-incidentally will also be the people who describe themselves as "very attractive". Strange, that.
The second group are most nicely described as "desperate", in a "most women tend to run away screaming loudly" sort of way. There's no one thing that identifies these blokes, although they have a tendency to finish their profiles with the words "please drop me a line!", "please, please get in touch" or "pretty please send me a message". If it's about reading between the lines, these blokes' profiles are often written in double-line spacing.
The third subsection are the genuine men who are simultaneously embarrassed by having to resort to internet dating ("I've never done this before, but my mate said it works, so I thought I'd give it a go...") but also committed enough to write an interesting, witty profile. Quite often these are the men who stand out, who have thought it through, who set themselves apart from the crowd. There are certainly some nice people out there, provided you can take 300 words as an accurate guide to someone's personality.
Having deciphered some of the code used in the profiles, the next stage is identifying your favourites. In some cases, this is not hard. In other cases it may be a quirky comment, or simply a certain turn of phrase that pushes someone to the front of the queue. Photographs help, of course, although I myself am too cowardly to add my own photo. What makes this whole selection process worse, however, is the fact that the objects of your affection can see that they have been placed on your favourite list; it's all a bit too traumatic for me to cope with. What happens if your favourites don't add you to *their* 'favourite' list? Are you then entitled to believe that you're worthless? Or is it just a case that they're member of the superficial brigade who believe that woman with short, dark hair are not as worthy as tall blondes? To be honest, the whole "whose favourite list am I on" malarky is a tad disturbing; I never knew that weirdos found me so attractive until I did internet dating!
Don't get me wrong, I've exchanged emails with some nice blokeys - one or two of whom I may well meet - but I'm still not convinced about this as a method of meeting new people. I still have 18 days left of my extended, paid-for membership left, after which time I might just let it drift quietly off. I might stick to snogging Wendy's mates after all...! :-)
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